Glaciers are melting faster than the U.S. Senate’s action to address greenhouse gas emissions and global warming issues. And a significant share of such sloth is attributable to the clout of powerful special interest groups representing the debate’s numerous factions.

Even a basic, bipartisan carbon emissions measure hasn’t escaped from this treacherous terrain.

According to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, 1,088 companies, unions and other organizations have reported lobbying since January 2009 on Congress’ “cap-and-trade” proposals.

These include H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey bill, which the House passed six months into the Obama administration; S. 1733, the Kerry-Boxer bill introduced in the Senate last fall and the Kerry-Lieberman “American Power Act,” which was circulated around Capitol Hill this year, but never formally introduced.

By the Center’s tally, about 700 clients have lobbied on the cap-and-trade bill each quarter this year, a decrease of about 20 percent from the 864 special interest groups lobbying during the peak of activity during the third quarter of 2009.

During the third quarter last year, the Center found, only 18 clients reported lobbying on an alternative measure, known as “cap-and-dividend,” sponsored by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), pictured above, and Susan Collins (R-Maine). By the end of June, the number of groups explicitly mentioning this legislation by name, the Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal (CLEAR) Act (S. 2877) in their lobbying reports on this bipartisan bill had jumped to 129.

This is just a fraction of the action the cap-and-trade bills have received, but nonetheless, it represents more than a 600 percent increase from the third quarter of last year, and an increase of 1,300 percent above the second quarter of last year when just nine clients explicitly lobbied on cap-and-dividend. Since April of last year, 142 unique clients have lobbied the legislation.

“We have as a company tried to identify and support legislation that addresses climate change and greenhouse gas emissions in an effective manner that is not onerous to our customers,” added Roger Thompson, a spokesman for Puget Sound Energy, which is also backing the CLEAR Act and lobbied on the measure since the third quarter of 2009.

Cantwell and Collins have brought persistence and a dose of bipartisanship to the climate change debate. They offer a simple message to put a price on carbon: a 40-page bill that would “cap-and-dividend” instead of “cap-and-trade.” They met multiple times with President Barack Obama to advocate for their measure, and even launched a humorous and informative YouTube campaign to explain it.

While their legislation has garnered just one-tenth of the attention from lobbyists as its related, 1,400-plus-page cap-and-trade proposals, it still faces an uphill climb, battling against industry, environmental groups and skeptical senators in both sides of the aisle. Still, the bill’s sponsors and supporters hope they can navigate these perilous waters.

“The catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf has increased the urgency to diversify our nation’s energy sources with new, cleaner technologies,” Cantwell and Collins (pictured left) said in a joint written statement provided to OpenSecrets Blog. “The CLEAR Act presents a simple, effective, and consumer-friendly path to get there.”

They continued: “We believe the CLEAR Act’s principles of simplicity, transparency, and equity appeal to the broadest audience and that the bill should serve as the basis for future energy and climate proposals.”

In June, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) identified the CLEAR Act as “one of the three comprehensive energy and climate proposals that should receive serious consideration,” according to Cantwell and Collins.

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Reid, told OpenSecrets Blog that the pair could count on the backing of Senate leadership if the votes could be found.

“If this bill had 60 votes, it would be on the floor,” Manley said. “Because of Republican obstructionism, the Senate is becoming a grave yard for all sorts of good legislation.”

Manley’s grim outlook was shared across the board by lobbyists interviewed by OpenSecrets Blog with few exceptions — although many remained earnest about the cause.

“We have to put a value on clean air. We have to put a value on the reduction of industrial emissions. A price on carbon is one way to put on a value,” he continued. “The only responsible thing to do is use market forces. We want the chance to solve the problem.”

“We’re not hopeful, but we’re still working hard,” said Adam Kolton, senior director of congressional and federal affairs for the National Wildlife Federation. “There’s not a day that goes by where the urgency isn’t clear — whether it’s fires, more severe storms or the oil spill.

“We would love to debate the substance,” Kolton added, noting his organization believes the CLEAR Act’s emission reduction standards are inadequate. “But we haven’t had the opportunity so far to have a debate. Unfortunately Republicans haven’t stepped forward to move a bill forward about climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.”

Several groups went so far as to discuss their lobbying on the CLEAR Act and climate legislation in general in the past tense.

“We engaged constructively with Senator Cantwell’s office in the past on the CLEAR Act,” Alan Jeffers, Media Relations Manager for ExxonMobil said in a statement e-mailed to OpenSecrets Blog. “While ExxonMobil has no formal position on the bill, as it has not advanced in this Congress, we appreciated the serious policy discussions we had with members of the senator’s staff on her alternative policy approach to addressing this complex issue.”

“People are stepping back and looking at all of the options,” Bob Bendick, director of U.S. government relations at the Nature Conservancy, told OpenSecrets Blog. “We’re going to look at all the options, and this will be one of the options. It represents an option for the future.”

Unlike the “cap-and-trade” measures, which seek to cap greenhouse gas emission and then dole out emissions permits in a complex trading system, the “cap-and-dividend” bill would cap greenhouse gases, auction off government emissions permits and return most of the auction proceeds directly to taxpayers as a dividend check.

The average American family of four would receive about $1,100 a year to help pay for any increased energy costs, supporters of the bill say. And 80 percent of all Americans would never see an increase in their energy bills.

Cantwell and Collins say the auction for emissions permits could raise as much as $126 billion in the first year, with revenue fluctuating in subsequent years in the range of $42 billion to $126 billion.

Three-fourths of the auction revenue, which they estimate to be between $31.5 billion and $94.5 billion in the first year of the policy, would be distributed to American households on an equal per-capita basis. The remaining one-fourth of the auction revenues would be used to help further reductions in emissions with investments in new technologies and transition assistance for industries.

In December, the Union of Concerned Scientists blasted the bill as “inadequate” and “too weak to meet its purported goals.” Still, this spring two big name environmentalist heralded the measure in the Huffington Post as the “last best chance for climate legislation before 2013″ and the Economist said the CLEAR Act was the “most promising” among congressional proposal to put a price on carbon and “refreshingly simple.”

Despite the long odds, though, the sponsors and supporters aren’t ready to quit.

“Many colleagues in the Senate have voiced their support for the cap-and-dividend approach embodied in the CLEAR Act,” Cantwell and Collins wrote in the statement to OpenSecrets Blog. “We will continue to push for more comprehensive action on energy and climate that is so critical to establishing our leadership on clean energy and creating clean energy jobs.”

“I believe there is a reasonable chance that the CLEAR Act can become the principle vehicle for discussing energy legislation in the next Congress,” Marcia Cleveland, a lobbyist for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, told OpenSecrets Blog. “We are encouraging our members to lobby their Senators to become co-sponsors of the CLEAR Act in the next Congress.

“Remember,” she continued, “the last major air pollution legislation passed in this country was the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act. That took 10 years.”

Media Contact

Viveca Novak
(202) 354-0111
press@crp.org

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